Google DocVerse Acquisition End Game: A Microsoft Office, Google Apps Bridge

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Can partners and customers hedge their bets in terms of creating pilot projects of Google Apps? Google’s acquisition of DocVerse last week makes it more likely than ever, offering the promise of enabling a bridge between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

(Google celebrated the year anniversary of its Google Apps channel partner program recently. Click here to read Upstart Google Apps Looks to Unseat Microsoft Exchange.)

Google announced the deal on Friday in its Google Enterprise Blog, noting that the small San Francisco-based company had developed a way to share Microsoft documents such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint over the Web.

The company had offered DocVerse accounts that enabled real-time sharing of documents as well as group-editing of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. The company said it would continue to support existing users of the service.

On the official DocVerse blog on Friday, CEO Shan Sinha and CTO Alex DeNeui wrote: “For the many people who use desktop software, like Microsoft Office, transitioning to the cloud was a challenge. Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds.”

Sinha and Deneui are ex-Microsoft employees who founded DocVerse in 2007. The company Website explains that the founders “finally gave up on constant back-and-forth e-mail attachments required to share and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.”

The DocVerse executives wrote: “We fundamentally believe that Google is one of the best-positioned companies to truly disrupt the world of productivity software. We’re looking forward to the opportunity to scale our vision at Google.”

And where does that start?

“Our first step will be to combine DocVerse with Google Apps to create a bridge between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.”

Such a bridge could enable channel partners to create pilot projects of Google Apps within organizations where Microsoft Office has been the standard. After all, even if you or your customers aren’t doing anything in the cloud, have you been curious about dipping a toe in? And that’s why the DocVerse acquisition could be truly disruptive.